“Well,” she replied quickly, “you took care of me first. I think I must have been out of my senses. But having this little monster to handle made things appear very different.” T’férgore blinked lazily, and struck out with ineffectual fists. The cherub-wings were perhaps hidden in folds of mull, but gazing on this wonderful creature’s allurements, I was seized with a Saturn-like desire to bite and devour every flower-tinted atom. I forgot that the Old Daguerreotype was at the gate, and worried my prey, breaking into a rhapsody of baby Romany. In the midst of my Bess’ums and S’eetums, and Old Dol’ums, Uncle Doctor appeared before me, and bent himself at T’férgore’s shrine, with an expression nearly as idiotic as my own. He clucked, whistled, and snapped his fingers, and for one moment I thought he was going to dance. But his legs were taken too stiffly for that, and he only limbered his entire length and cracked the glass in a way which damaged him forever as my Old Daguerreotype. Then he straightened himself up apologetically and shook hands with Jennie, saying in his most ministerial tones, “And how are you to-day, Dr. Jane?” I must say that everything Uncle Doctor did on this occasion astonished me. It was the first time I had been permitted to see a visitor, and they should have prepared me for the unusual side-lights I should now catch upon the Old Daguerreotype. He held professional women in disdain, and I had heard him utter homilies against wives who tacked all their maiden or acquired names before their husband’s cognomen. Yet here he was parading Dr. Jane’s title, and almost capering before her in his exuberant desire to win favor. They sat down around me, and I noticed how unembarrassed Jennie was by the Daguerreotype’s white tie and the clip of his lips and fearful respectability. “A little daughter in the house,” said Uncle Doctor Theophilus, indicating with pomp the human atom in my lap, “is indeed a well-spring of pleasure.” “We counted on her brother Trotwood Copperfield, instead of his sister Betsey Trotwood,” said Julian. “It was a mere fancy,” I insisted, “and girls are just as good as boys any day.” “Better,” granted Julian. “I’m quite as glad that T’férgore is a girl.” “But it disarranges the name,” said Julian. “His name was Fergus Dering, but I think we shall have to call her Ferguson.” “Not at all,” I dissented indignantly. “T’férgore!” mused Uncle Doctor Theophilus. “What kind of un-Christian appellation have you stumbled upon there?” “The name being Fergus,” explained Julian, “we call her--as Lena would put it--T’férgore in short.” We sat in silences of several minutes at a time, hearing an apple drop in the orchard, the call of the katydids, or the restless stepping of Leander in his stable. Already the smoky light of autumn was mellowing distances. “How remote this little spot appears to be from the centres of traffic,” said Uncle Doctor Theophilus, with a pulpit gesture.